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- [00:01]
A
Hey experts listeners. I want to key you into something that we do very special here at OPS Experts Club and that's a masterclass. We have a free masterclass called Foundations that scale. And the great thing about this masterclass is it's for operation professionals who are growing businesses. One of the most dangerous things you can do as an operator is grow businesses on a foundations that's not stable. So in this particular masterclass, we take apart all of the inside pieces of your team, your tech and how they're using time, and we make sure that you're building on a foundation that's stable. So if you want to check out a great masterclass completely for free, go to foundationsthatscale.com we'll see you there.
- [00:37]
B
Welcome to the Ops Experts Club with Aaron Taran and Savannah. This podcast will take you behind the scenes of some of the finer details of multimillion dollar companies. These ops experts have dealt with operations for scaling companies and, and well established businesses with anywhere from small to large teams. If you've ever been deep into the details of a major company, then you know how much it takes and these conversations are just for you. Welcome to the Ops Experts Club podcast.
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A
Ops Expert Club.
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C
You.
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A
See today, how are things in the mighty state of Washington?
- [01:17]
C
Things are. Wow, that's a big question. They're good here in this little subsection of Washington. I don't know about the entire state.
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A
Are they plum good?
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C
They're plum good, man. Plum tuckered out from this weekend.
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A
That's great. Planting plum trees. Taryn Turner, I love hearing your personal best. You know that's the second that email that came through today from our client, that's like, I'll really miss seeing Taren's personal best. I thought you and every other person. That's not immediate, Turner, because we all get excited about old McTurner how to farm. Dude, you have a great thing going up there in your little subsection of Washington.
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C
Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I mean it's a mystery to people. They just, they have to talk to me live to get updates on my life.
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A
You are a pretty private individual. I, I love it when you let people get a little sneak peek into putting in 40 posts. What'd you put in two weeks ago? 40, 40 fence posts?
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C
No, we, we got our 90 fence post delivery. We have to put those in next month.
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A
Shoot. 90 fence posts. I just think it's something so different. You know, we get on here, we talk about like operations, especially around the digital world. And then Terrence talking about putting in Fence posts and planting plum trees. You know, it's just such a different thing.
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C
Yes, sir, it's the best.
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A
And your chicken run. Your chicken run really enamored people. A few weeks.
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C
Sure did.
- [02:28]
A
Awesome. Well, hey, I thought we could talk about today. You know, a lot of our clients have been talking about lately and something that EOS Entrepreneurs operating system from the book Traction by Gino Wickman talks about a lot, and that would be metrically measuring your people and having a metric that's associated back to each individual that's doing work for you. So maybe kick us off and give us some initial thoughts on that. Taren, I know we had had a client just this last week say, hey, I'd really like by the time we get back from vacation for you guys to have metrics drawn up. Just at least a draft on what are good metric ways we could be measuring each employee and a metric they could own. Yeah, for sure.
- [03:03]
C
And I think a great place where it starts from, even before you get to KPIs, is job descriptions. Because that's of where we start with the process is as we're organizing through the teams and running them through, seeing what they're actually doing, building out job descriptions. Whenever I build out a job description, every job description has a KPI section on the bottom. You know, so it's based on the words above in this job description. What can we measure from this person to know that they're completing their job? So, I mean, you can start from there, but if you're wanting to just jump right into it outside of job descriptions. Yeah, you know, it's going to take a little bit of time talking with the person, understanding what they do and determining what's going to show that they're successful in their role. You know, either moving something forward, operating efficiently, making money, et cetera.
- [03:52]
A
Yeah, you know, so the way we do it here at Co Lab Team is, you know, we usually start with the gap analyzer we've talked about on the show if you're ever interested in that. Gap Analyzer.com a quick tool to be able to inventory your players to see are there gaps on your team, are there overlaps on your team? So for us, you know, we pushed out takes 15 minutes of individual team time for them to go through and say what they're doing the daily, weekly, monthly. And then from there, usually we'll take that and shake it down into a job description from the job description. Like you had said, Taren, at the bottom of that job description, you know, you're Laying out this whole framework of this is what we can expect from you for your job. You get a couple of real great results out of that. You get KPIs like what you're discussing. You also get opportunities to have conversations in your 5, 5, 5 evaluations, like your course, the evals according to the EOS standards based upon what the understanding of this person's role is. But then from the three to five key roles that then should filter into that KPIs. That also is what educates you on your org chart. Yeah, I mean, so on your org chart you're like, hey, this is what the top level does. This is what those who they who all roll up underneath each one of our leaders do. And on the org chart itself, those same three to five main roles and responsibilities that there should be KPIs tied to is all in one central spot. So I do think that you're right. If you can start with, hey, does everybody in the organization have a job description? And if they're old, let's pull those things out and brush them up. And I would say push them at your people first. Right. Like, I'm not saying you as a leader have to be the one that brushes everything up, pushing your people, hey, is this still what you're doing? If not, we make a list of other things that you do or things that you're not doing. Let's have a conversation about it. Then from there, brushing those things up, you can come up with the three to five key duties they're doing, put those onto the org chart, and then that's what we should be metrically measuring so that we know, hey, where should we go back to? If there's a kink in the line somewhere, if there's a pain point in the organization somewhere, who should be owning that metric and going back to the source?
- [05:39]
C
Mm, yeah. And then are you going to keep it on the scorecard, you know, or what are you going to do with it from there? People love saying things like, we want to get KPIs for everybody. But then what's the next step? You know, is it just going to lift somewhere? Who's going to touch it? Who's going to make sure they're hitting it? Who's going to track it? Where are you going to track it? You know, those are also important next steps. Not only is the KPI important, but what are you going to do with it now?
- [06:05]
A
No, it's so good, Taren. I think that, you know, as an operations firm, like, as somebody that's doing operations for. I think we're at 33 clients right now. We have 22 people that are working with us here at the Colab team. I think sometimes there can be it really. And I think you do a really good job at this. I'll watch you needle some of the most powerful leaders that we've ever been in the middle of leading operations for their company. And for you, just ask simple questions like, no problem, we'll get that done. But why are we doing that? I mean, like, as far as just like asking them why? Because I think a lot of times visionaries, they feel peer pressure. Maybe they're in a mastermind. They're around a group of their peers. They start talking about KPIs and they start feeling this insecurity around why people don't have KPIs. Almost like they don't want to talk about it. They don't even want to let their friends know they don't have KPIs. Then they come back to their ops team. They're like, we need KPIs. I need KPIs for every person that's on this team. And it's like, okay, that's great. And we can do that. But realize, number one, take some time. Right? And number two, let's make sure we're putting our time to it. You know, we, we had some visionary send us over some sheets. They want to figure it out from another entity out there. We can fill out sheets, but that takes time to build that data. So are you just trying to get down to a number associated each person and then. Exactly. Right. Like you were saying, Taren, and what are we going to do with that number? Yeah, I mean, is that a number that should be on a scorecard? You know, Eos would say, start with your leadership team first. Probably you're not going to get everybody in the organization's metric on the leadership team level scorecard. That's probably not appropriate. So then if it's not on the leadership team level, scorecard. The scorecard is just a simple place that'll shake down the organization from top to bottom. Hey, this is the funnel where it starts. This funnels down to clients. This is the interactions that we're having. This is how the money that's created out of it. Every, every business we believe should have a scorecard. Eos is really big on that. But then from the scorecard, maybe it's not leadership team level, but maybe it's department level. You know, maybe if they're part of the tech team or by the. Part of the marketing team or part of the finance team, then ask ourselves, okay, so should that person's KPI be on that scorecard? But even probably some, some people, their scorecard doesn't. Or their KPI isn't going to end up on a scorecard. But it should be something that I would say at minimum should be discussed every quarterly 555. Like, let's be having. This person needs to know, are they doing their job well or not, or are they not? Because that's where we find the most pain with employees or contractors working for businesses is we don't have a good way of determining are they doing a good job. You know, and it's left to, like, the gut check of visionary. And, and, you know, that is sometimes he or she may just have had a stressful night or maybe a fight with their family or maybe like, money's tight and it makes them get really, really introspective on every little thing inside the business instead of, no, no, deep breath, take a step back. What was their role? And are they doing that well? And therefore, no matter how you feel about them, but are they doing their job? You know, I think it's really important to get to the bottom of.
- [08:56]
C
Yeah. And at the same time, we can't be so binary with our evaluations of either yes or no, like, why didn't they hit it? What else is in the way? It could not be their fault. They could be taken a completely different direction. We could have come up with this KPI three months ago, and now what they're doing looks entirely different because visionaries are visionaries, and even they change what they're doing. So it also just takes that human touch point of evaluating it, you know, in the, in the bigger scheme of what's going on in the company too.
- [09:29]
A
Which is why I really feel like that's a really good point, Taren. Like, which is why I feel like it's really important to have an operating system that you're operating your business on. Right. You know, we, we talk a lot here about eos. It doesn't have to be os. There's great systems out there. Scalable is a great one. Ryan Dice's system, there's all kinds of. What was the other one that we execute to win as etw? There's a lot of different operating systems out there, and some of them have technology associated with them, and others of them are, are simpler than that. It's just an operating system for people and how you triage Pain and how you hold people accountable. That's how I would define eos. It's not built on a piece of technology. It's really built on a system of how we talk about pain points in the business and how we solve for those. Right. I think it can come back to we're committing to this as the operating system. And then on our weekly L10 meeting, level 10 meeting within us, we're going to talk through rocks.
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C
Right.
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A
These are the big, these are the big pain points, the big projects that each individual has been assigned and is going to work through for this quarter. And then that's where you can begin to tell, like, what you're talking about. TARAN OF okay, wait a minute. So have we paused things that we said that they were going to be responsible for and added on some new things they're going to be responsible for? And so now there's some confusion on. Is that still within their scope? Is that still part of their role? So having a place like Rocks where you can have that conversation. But I think also that's what I really love about Eos's 555. Like the quarterly evals is as you. The five, five, five for them is the three to five mission vision values. Like, as far as the first things that you discussed, the next thing are the three to five roles or responsibilities. Is that still the three to five main roles or responsibilities from their job description? Because like you were saying, sometimes that varies. Sometimes it's like, well, I was asked to do a bunch of extra things this quarter that have nothing to do with my three to five core duties. And then finally, the three to five rocks that they were assigned, did they get them done or did they not get them done? And I think that if you'll stick to the framework, if you'll stick to an operating system, it really helps to shore up some of these gaps so you're not chasing the same hamster around the same wheel. I feel like you and I've been in the middle of clients, Taren, where I feel like we've been working with these people for years now, chasing the same damn hamster. They won't just lock and load on a system and say, this is the way we process pain. This is the way we work through issues. This is the way we hold people accountable and we're not going to vary from it.
- [11:48]
C
Yes, for sure. Those have been some fun times too.
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A
There's, there's nothing more annoying than getting paid to create solutions when you feel like you're just chasing like A dog chasing its tail. You're like, yeah, I mean, we can solve for that. But this is the same problem we've been trying to solve for since you brought us on. And the problem is we can only do so much. And if you, Mr. And Mrs. Visionary are not willing to hold the line on these things, people are going to keep only doing the things they want to do or that you keep banging down the door on them to do. They're going to avoid the things they don't want to do. And then it's just like pushing peas around a plate. Do you like all my analogies today? Dog chasing his tail, peas around a plate. Like it's just going to be us chasing the same hamster around the wheel.
- [12:32]
C
Taren, man, I am just impressed you got all of them correct.
- [12:36]
A
I notice I did not mention two birds in the bush. You know what I'm saying? Like that. Stay away from that one.
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C
That's for sure. Oh, yeah, KPIs, they're a fun one. You know, one of those conversations we get into where, yeah, everybody wants it. And then you also get to a point where you start looking at too many KPIs. That's the point. I like when it's like we're all about KPIs and you get this scorecard and it's like 40 numbers long and then they hit this wallet and they're like, why are we looking at this many numbers?
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A
You wanted it so true. And it's like I will say so. Maybe we should talk about that for a minute. Taryn, what do you think are the key metrics KPIs wise that should end up on a scorecard? Especially first at a leadership team level and then maybe at a department level. What would you say are the KPIs that you would want on your scorecard?
- [13:31]
C
You know, that's a great question. I get asked a lot when I'm first working with, you know, a client and we do have our best of scorecard template. We've come up with which is the most recommended numbers I've seen in the past, which is how I put it together.
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A
Yeah.
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C
But really it has just been so different. It depends on what people, what the leader wants to see and what they gauge as a part. And some people are very financially driven and numbers driven. Some people are more emotionally and people driven. And I think that gets reflected in what they want to see. But aside from that, it's, you know, obviously we want to see the health of the business. So money coming in. Money Going out, health of the sales, closing rates, new sales, customers, marketing efforts, what's working, what's not working. You don't want to see fluctuations and trends in anything. And some of the KPIs look at too, are just, are people doing their job on time? What are the average response time for a customer support ticket? How many outstanding tickets were there on average every day? You know, little things like that or issues breakdowns. How many tech issues did the customers experience and how quickly were they resolved?
- [14:46]
A
Listening to you talk and thinking. Most visionaries I know don't love numbers. I mean, they actually repel numbers. You know, in fact, there are some of the biggest names we've ever worked with that don't like talking about their financial numbers. All. They don't even like going to the finance L10s. They don't even like. They just want to know money's coming in and that somebody sorting it out. I mean, like, they're, they're out in the front and they're banging down doors and they're bringing in dollars, millions of dollars, like, and, and they're doing, you know, they do a big event. It's a $4 million event, and it makes them feel so good. But I think it's really important to have somebody that you trust and some way that they can be accountable with you around the numbers. I think that's really important. But do you think too, Taryn, like listening to you talk and thinking about numbers and thinking about most visionaries that just get stuck with numbers and. Yeah. I can't tell you how many times we've had visionaries say, hey, will you just put that into a dashboard for me? Because I think that they just like seeing go graphs, you know, or they like seeing pictures more than looking at numbers. But would you say, I think, especially when we're starting to talk about things like let's say a tech VA that you brought on to create thumbnails for your podcast and you know, that's like brushing up your edits and that is posting your stuff to your podcast platform. Like, okay, well, we need a KPI on that person. Right? Let's say, because everybody in the organization needs a, a metric that we're tracking. Does the visionary need to see that person's KPI or do you kind of. I, I would say. And maybe I'm influencing you. So pushback. You don't like this? I would say, like, no, no. Task down to your leaders of each department and make sure they understand what the KPIs should be for. Each of the people underneath them. But you, Mr. Or Ms. Visionary, don't get so far into the weeds. Like task that down to your people and then make sure it makes sense. Maybe if you want them to give a quick overview of, hey, this is what I thought for these different people. If you want to get that far into it. But really EOs one throat to choke. Like if your technology department's failing, it's your tech director that you're going to want to grab onto, not the people down south of them down the line. If your marketing's not performing like let's say on your scorecard, you're watching like your ad spend, your roas return on your ad spend. Maybe you've got your how many times it's clicked or how much action is taken out of those clicks maybe and it leads to purchases. That's great. And there are people that are probably controlling that, but really it's the director of marketing that's controlling all that. Not the ad buyer, the different people creating the creatives, not the different, like it's. No, no, director of marketing channels all that up. And they should have metrics on everybody south of the line. And then you need to ask yourself which of those metrics should make it to the scorecard to take the, to tell the best picture at a snapshot of where the business is at. But really, do I as the CEO need to understand every single metric on my team? What are your thoughts on that?
- [17:22]
C
Yeah, I think I've seen it both ways. But yeah, most of the time what they're experiencing is they don't have somebody they trust that's keeping an eye on it. And that tends to be when they do want to narrow down into specific people is because they don't have somebody they know is handling it. So they do want to know exactly how many posts this person made to social media, even though they're, you know, getting paid 1k a month to do it, it's like in the grand scheme of people on the team, it's such a small role but they don't really know if it's getting done or not because they don't have anybody else to let them know if it's getting done or not.
- [18:01]
A
Yeah, no, that's good. And so I think maybe the take home for any of these things is build people that you trust. Right. Deputize people over certain areas and then have checkpoints, which, I mean, I know I sound just like a broken record going over and over again, but it really comes back to operating system it really comes back to if I as a visionary have some heartburn around some number that I heard somebody say, or I saw a post didn't go out, or I'm wondering about maybe, maybe I saw something like a thumbnail somewhere where I'm like, that looks awful. And I want to chase back, great, drop it on the issues list to talk about it the next L10 because that's not the house burning down. That's a pretty small issue. And then when you bring that, people say, hey, I know some of the thumbnails look like trash, or hey, I noticed we were missing a post on Friday, that we have a cadence, right? Like bring that issue to the issues list to be discussed in front of the whole team. So whoever's responsible for that, head of the department is going to have to give an answer in front of all of their peers. And if they don't have a good answer, that they bring you back a good answer by the next week so that you're able to chase that down. But I think keeping everything in the life cycle of how this operation should work according to the system I think is so important. Otherwise it's all knee jerk reaction to things. When you see things you don't like, you chase it down. Hey, we need a KPI on that. I want to see a daily report. We've had visionaries, Hey, I want daily reports every day sent in by everybody on the team. And you and I have thought to ourselves, who's, who's reading those? Like, I don't know, anybody's reading those. You know what I mean? And if nobody's reading those, it doesn't take long before your team starts to realize, oh, so this is a fool's errand. Like, this is like, like a waste of time then. So I'm just going to put bullshit down, you know, because I know nobody's really looking at this. And then actually I believe that's when you start creating people that are cheating the system. Because now you've played all your cards, you've given them a bullshit fool's errand. They're filling stuff out and they can put stuff in there that they know is not true. Nobody ever calls them on it and they're like, oh, so nobody's really watching. And then now they just play the field instead of, no, no, bring it to an L10, let's have a conversation, chase it from top down. Whoever those people answer to, let that leader determine to the people south of them are not good at their role based upon their KPIs they've determined and then you just have that one throat to choke, which is deputizing people that you trust in key areas.
- [20:15]
C
Yeah. And when it comes to leaders and KPIs, sometimes or most of the time, their KPIs are dependent on the people they're leading to too. So they're determinant on the people under them hitting their KPIs. You know, a good example is a sales manager. Their total KPIs, the whole sales team. So any number of person on their sales team isn't hitting their target. They're going to be responsible for them and making sure that that's corrected. You know, same with any type of marketing. You know, customer support. Customer manager is going to be making sure every support agent under them is hitting their KPIs. So that's the tie in between the leaders KPIs and the people they're leading.
- [20:56]
A
You know, I, I thought, and we'll button up with this today, but Pete Vargas did a really cool thing once I, I watched him do. And that was he tossed down to his director of ops, Jess, and said, hey, so your incentive plan for this year, your ability to bonus and make more money will be directly tied with how people are completing their rocks, you know, and then it was like, oh man, Jess was like a hound on me, you know what I'm saying? Like, she was just all on top of it when it came to where people out with their rocks. You know, a lot of slippage happens in organizations because we're not paying attention, you know, and at rock parties, it gets a little bit sloppy or maybe people are like, no, they're not taking it too serious on whether they get their rocks done or not done. But if you tie somebody's pay to other people getting their stuff done, then that person is going to really pay tight attention to that stuff getting done. And I think giving people incentives based upon it, hey, you're going to hit this maximum of your incentive plan if all of these things get completed. If not, it's going to be a percentage of this maximum and then let that drive people. So I think creating KPIs, assigning them to key people, you know, can be responsible to them. Incentivizing them to keep those, those KPIs kept well, I think is really the magic, the secret sauce, not getting involved as a visionary, where you're chasing down every minute detail of every KPI, task it out, trust your people are going to do it and then hold them accountable.
- [22:13]
B
Yep.
- [22:14]
C
And if you got a small team, it's your operator. You know, you might not have a leadership team. It could just be your operator.
- [22:19]
A
That's right. And I will say this. If you have a really small team, don't underestimate your ea, because I think that your executive assistant very likely could be your next best candidate to elevate up into an operations role because they've been shadowing you so long. So be thinking about next, next era, parent and be thinking about how you can grow your teams. Make sure you don't become the choking point for your entire organization because you're trying to keep too much held to yourself. Deputize, empower, hold them accountable. Commit to a system a hundred percent. Taran Turner, it was a delight and a pleasure. You're a gentleman and a scholar. Thank you for time today and I appreciate your time. And Ops Experts, thanks for tuning in. Was that a good one, Taran? Was that a lot?
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C
That was beautiful.
- [23:02]
A
Okay, great. Ops Experts, thanks for tuning in today. We'll see you next week here on Ops Experts Club.
- [23:09]
B
Thank you for tuning in to the Ops Experts Club podcast. New episodes available every week on Spotify, itunes, and everywhere you listen to podcasts. If you're curious about how some of the biggest names in entrepreneurship have scaled their businesses to the next level, check out some of our best content on this topic by going to foundations that scale.com you can find the link in our bio and do your part to improve as an Ops Expert.